VMs: Re: Michiton oladabas

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [Rene:] [that f116v is just decipherer's scribbles] is possible,
    > maybe even likely, but by no means certain.

Indeed I doubt it myself... For one thing, there are those drawings on
the upper left corner, with "standard VMS" style and subject.

Also the Voynichese glyphs in <aror sheey> look just like those
in the main text, written with same hand and same confidence.
On the other hand the Roman letters look rather clumsy.

Rene, I believe it was you who reported that the ink of f116v looks
similar to that of the main body. This detail may be significant
because there are hints that the VMS ink is not the standard
iron-gall formula.

It is also hard to imagine why the two words <aror sheey>, and only
those, were left "undecoded" among the rest. If the decipherer was
trying out an incomplete correspondence table, we should see a more
uniform mixture of Roman and Voynichese letters, shouldn't we?  

Finally, the large "M" at the end of line 2 looks similar to the "M"s
in the zodiacal diagrams ("May" and "March"), and there is a general
resemblance between other letters too. So it seems quite possible that
they were done by the same person. Now the spellings of the month
names are quite peculiar, and almost surely they were added before the
VMS got to Rome.

Thus I would rather believe that both the month names and f116v were
written by the same person, who could read and write Voynichese
fluently, but had very limited command of Roman script and of the
(apparently European) language in which he had to write those notes.

All the best,

--stolfi